Here is my documentation of following the tutorial for blocking out and animating a rigged character shifting its weight from side to side. As always, I found this informative in terms of how (relatively) human anatomy prepares for its movements, its interaction with weight in terms of physics, and the idiosyncratic body language imbued even in small movements like this one. It’s especially interesting and illuminating to me how animators use movement to communicate identity, emotion, and personality in these movements in a way that the conscious mind behind an untrained eye wouldn’t notice, but the subconscious recognises as significant.
The process began with ‘blocking’ out the movements in five frame increments; I like working like this – it sets out the bare bones of how things will look in the graph editor in such a way that editing it later is straight forward.
This is the first iteration of the fully animated weight shift from start to finish. Every movement is happening at 5 frame increments, but the result is that the ball with legs shifts its weight from side to side. I’d say this looks alright, but it would be an interesting challenge to try to communicate nervous energy in the same movement, as the ball in this animation looks fairly confident.As can be seen in the graph editor at the bottom, some keyframes have been spaced out more than others to prolong certain movements in line with how gravity would interact with a body moving in this way. Other movements are shortened to communicate the necessary rushing as gravity drags the body down. I was surprised again with the amount of personality communicated by this lightning and lengthening of certain movements, it puts a spring in the step of the rig. (I apologise for the massive green frame on one side of the video – I don’t know why that’s there and when I try to crop it out it disappears).The same sequence from the side.I’d noticed that somehow I’d started my animation sequence on the wrong pose instead of a neutral one, so I moved my sequence back by a few frames and input a neutral pose at the start, then a slight shift to the left before the initial bigger shift to the right. I also put a polygon cube under the rig to act as a floor for the scene as I’d just learned we were meant to be doing that the whole time.On first editing my work into spline from blocking, it appeared I’d created a monster. The joints moved seemingly of their own volition and the rig looked possessed.
I’d hoped to continue editing the graph to improve the stepped to spline transition, but my file stopped recognising the reference (the rig) and refused to open the Maya file with the rig even after locating the reference in my hard drive, which essentially dumped all my progress. So I will have to start again.
Unfortunately due to an electrical fault in Stockport I wasn’t able to get to this lecture in person, so I followed the recorded lecture at home.
Anticipation: The action that immediately precedes the expected action; the mechanical buildup for force. Anticipation is the most natural way to build up internal force in order to execute dynamic motion. “Any animation consists of Anticipation, Action, and Reaction.” (Bill Tytla)
An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force – this law applies to everything in the universe, including us. It’s precisely because of this law that anticipating left before walking right results in a conservation of energy.
Anticipation is the key to describing how much strength and force go into a movement, while squash and stretch ‘sell’ the action as realistic and believable.
(George Toombes (2024) ‘Friday Session 11/10/24:Â Critiquing Pendulum animations. Differentiating weights using spacing via Pendulum. Planning/animating Ball with Tail.’ [Recorded Lecture]. PU002332: 3D Computer Animation Fundamentals. University of the Arts London, London College of Communication. 11 October.)
For now, this assignment will be blocking only – fluidity of movement and spline will be added at a later stage. Settings: 100 Frames, 24fps, side view only. We are advised to push too far at first and then pull our animation back rather than starting with small movements and continuously adding to them bit by bit, this is often what makes animation more dynamic and interesting than real life.
Keep it Simple, Stupid.
In order to ‘block’ in the poses for this assignment, we had to set the Default in Tangent space to Linear, and the Default out Tangent to Stepped in the animation tab of the preferences window. This stops Maya from interpolating the in-between stages of our set keyframes, so instead of making the object float gradually between location changes, it will jump suddenly.
I posed the rig this way as the default starting position based on the video references of squirrels shown in the lecture (I also changed the root of the rigged model because I I like foxes).
This is what the keyframes looked like when blocked out – this was an interesting way to work and to see how cartoonish motion, more loosely based on reality is set out before being fully fleshed out and perfected. I like this way of working.
My fox-ball jumping. It’s obviously clunky and jumpy due to the way the movement was set out in the timeline, but I like the way this moves, at least at this early stage.
This served as my introductory session to Friday’s lectures on animation fundamentals as I’d missed the first week of teaching. I was introduced to a set of core principles I want to make a note of here:
When working in Maya, always save as Maya Ascii format
Import rigged objects into Maya via the Reference Editor
Attach all files to project titled Animation Fundamentals, saved to Hard Drive or desktop
I was added to the Microsoft Teams group where resources are added, including tutorials to work through tests at own speed
We were reminded to buy or borrow a copy of the Animator’s Survival Kit, and to familiarise ourselves with the twelve principles of animation
Then onto the pendulum test:
We used the ultimate rigged pendulum found on Behance via the following link: https://www.behance.net/gallery/17774421/Ultimate-Rigs-for-Free
We were told to create Quick Select Sets for the Pendulum itself, then the joints separately for ease and speed of selection while animating. Quick Select Sets are added via the Create tab > Sets > Quick Select Sets > the set is named, then added to shelf.
First we keyed in the movement from left to right, but Maya automatically gradually slowed the pendulum down as it stopped, when what we wanted was an abrupt stop. To do this, we used the graph editor. Rather than manually editing the curve along the Z axis to straighten it out, we were advised to use the Linear Tangents feature shown here:
Next we rotated the joints in line with the pendulum’s movement along the Z axis to illustrate the sense of gravitational pull, being dragged behind:
After the abrupt stop at frame 40 comes the tricker part, the pendulum joints swing back with the force of the energy with which they were dragged up to this point. They have to be animated snapping back in a way that makes realistic sense in line with the speed at which the pendulum was moving – remembering also that the force will never match what it was before. The pendulum will never swing back higher than it did in the first instance.
At this point in the lesson I was starting to appreciate the fluidity of the pendulum joints’ movement and how they illustrate the sudden force with which the pendulum stops moving, and beginning to get more comfortable with the software and rig we were using.
By the end I was spotting something like a pattern in the graph editor:
But watching the playback I’d clearly rushed through some of the keyframes when they should have been spaced apart more to denote the slow fluidity of the joints as they gradually stopped swinging:
Even a relatively small adjustment in spacing made a difference:
This is how playback looked after cleaning up the keyframes and offsetting the bottom control/joint by 3 frames:
Planning this out I began thinking about weight values and squash and stretch – the first few times I scrubbed through the keyframes I’d added so far looked uncanny because the ball didn’t behave like a ball, it didn’t change shape on impact with the ground and wasn’t stretched by its upward motion. The ball also appeared as if it was floating up and down rather than being moved by a force from left to right as it bounced, so I had to “break” the tangents in the graph editor first so that they could be adjusted:
The green line, representing the ball’s movement from left to right, had to be adjusted by each individual keyframe to round out the ball’s trajectory, this produced a more realistic looking bounce.
Adding in squash and stretch using the scale controls shown below. Using the Object tab on the right hand side I adjusted the Translate Y axis from 0.4 in the frame before impact to -0.5 to the frame containing the impact.
The below screenshot shows the keyframes clustering around each impact of the ball against the ground:
I wanted to rotate the ball as it moved but I wasn’t able to find the controls for this in the rigged model, if I have more time in the future I can revisit this task to include rotation and texturing.
